


Your Friendly (?) Neighborhood Spider-Tetch

by alpacasandravens



Category: Gotham (TV)
Genre: M/M, Pre-Relationship, SPIDER TETCH, executioner!jim, for the Fandom Games!, spider-man!Jervis, vaguely-MJ!Jon, very inspired by far from home
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-28
Updated: 2019-07-28
Packaged: 2020-07-24 01:35:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,200
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20018101
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alpacasandravens/pseuds/alpacasandravens
Summary: Spider-Tetch, Spider-Tetch, Does Whatever A Spider-Tetch Does (arrest/subdue/beat up Jim Gordon and maybe, possibly, get a date with a cute boy)





	Your Friendly (?) Neighborhood Spider-Tetch

**Author's Note:**

> For the Round One fandom games prompt: a day in the life of a character with superpowers. this cursed content brought to you by whoever in the Gotham group suggested Spider Tetch.

Jervis Tetch was bitten by a radioactive spider when he was seventeen years old, and, in his opinion, his life had done nothing but go downhill ever since.

There are some things they don’t tell you before you’re bitten by said radioactive spider. (Not that those things come with a terms and conditions, or even a warning label.) The first thing is that shooting webs out of your wrists is exceedingly unhelpful when you’re mildly scared of heights and definitely scared of bugs. The second is that it doesn’t make you any more popular, and, if it were possible, does the reverse. The last thing is that, if you happen to have been already gifted with hypnosis, the chemical changes caused by the spider bite speedily remove that gift.

Long story short, he was Spider-Man, he didn’t particularly care about protecting Gotham City, and now shoplifting would get him arrested.

“They weren’t eligible for the senior citizen discount, and they took it anyway! They’re GUILTY!” Former GCPD Commissioner and current masked lunatic Jim Gordon yelled. “I must deliver their sentence - execution!”

After one too many deals with the Penguin, the respected policeman had fallen off the deep end, taking his anger at himself for breaking his own moral code out on other, generally minor, rule-breakers.

“You’re committing a crime against fashion right now, Jim,” Jervis said, watching from his perch on a nearby balcony as Jim struggled against the webbing holding him to the wall. Jim had been the first criminal Jervis had dealt with, back when he’d become the Spider-Man almost five years ago. He had been far from the last. “That shirt? With _that_ axe for an arm? They’re two clashing shades of steel.”

“You’re all guilty! Vigilantism is a crime,” Jim shouted, busting out of the webbing, which fell to the sidewalk beside him, “and I’ll execute you for it!”

“Oh dear,” Jervis said, hopping down from the balcony. He barely managed not to flinch - he knew the fall wouldn’t hurt him, but that didn’t make it any less scary. “That’s quite a threat, Jim. But you’ve committed crimes too, haven’t you?”

Jim glared and advanced, swinging his axe threateningly.

“And are legal and moral crimes the same?” He asked, walking backwards just as fast as Jim was walking toward him. When he reached the wall, he kept walking, inching up it backwards as he spoke. “Legally, I shouldn’t pirate movies. But morally, no one cares. When enforcing laws to the letter sends families to the streets, is that a crime to you, Jim?”

“You’re just mad I sent Alice away,” Jim decided. “Following the law meant you couldn’t be near her, and now you’re working against justice!”

Jervis sighed. Really, that had been why he’d started this vigilantism business in the first place. One of Jim’s last acts as Commissioner had been to gather up the street kids of Gotham and send them to a home upstate. After a mix-up with forms, the children had been officially lost for years. Alice had been one of them - Alice, who had been his last real connection to any sort of normal life, even if she’d hated him.

What he’d wanted was to kill Jim, the man who’d taken the love of his life from him. (He was no longer sure that Alice was or had ever been the love of his life, but he’d certainly thought she was.) But he couldn’t kill. Not because he had any sort of moral objection to it, just because he wouldn’t get away with tying Jim up in his webs and dangling him from a bridge as easily if the public thought he was a villain.

“You aren’t justice, Jim. Neither am I. Laws are often outdated and unnecessary and do not demand beheadings for any crime currently on-books, certainly not purchasing a slightly cheaper movie ticket.”

As Jim yelled and began to swing his axe, Jervis jumped off the building, shooting a web from his wrist. He swung through the street with one hand, using the other to thoroughly encase Jim in webs. His yell grew quiet as the webs wrapped around his open mouth, stifling the noise. 

“What’re you doing?” A voice asked from behind him.

Jervis spun around to see Jonathan. His neighbor Jonathan. Who was weird and strangely quiet and downright unnerving and (coincidentally) incredibly attractive. He hastily tried to hide the web still connecting his wrist to Jim’s terrified and screaming body currently hanging about halfway between the bridge and the river. Unfortunately, the screams themselves, which were occasionally punctuated with “You’re GUILTY! I’ll get you for this, Spider!” and the fact that Jervis was wearing the Spider-Man costume without the mask didn’t lend themselves to subtlety.

“How strong are those webs?” Jonathan asked, ignoring the probably-surprising fact that Spider-Man was his neighbor, walking up to the edge of the bridge, and looking over. “For such a thin material, they hold a surprising amount of weight.” He neglected to comment on the costumed villain that made up the weight. “What’re they made of?”

“I don’t know.”

“How do you not know? Do they -” Jonathan stopped in the middle of his sentence and stepped closer to him, pulling up Jervis’s sleeve on his right arm to look at where the webbing was attached to his wrist. “That’s so cool!” He didn’t look up, continuing to examine the area the webbing came out of Jervis’s skin, occasionally poking it like he was conducting some kind of experiment. “How does it work? Never mind. This is fascinating.”

“If you don’t mind, I should pull him up.” Jonathan immediately dropped his hand, and Jervis took out the small pang of regret he felt on Jim by pulling him up onto the bridge and slamming him into the concrete with slightly excessive force. 

He wasn’t sure ‘fascinating’ was a good thing to be. (He was just a person. Who could shoot webs and had super-strength that didn’t make him look at all muscular.) Still, he was admittedly desperate for any semblance of friendship or affection, and he’d noticed how Jonathan looked every time they’d interacted. 

“Do you want to see how they work?”

Jonathan tilted his head to the side and scrunched his eyebrows together. “I’m interested.”

“Would you like to fly?” Jervis held out a hand.

Nodding, Jonathan took it. They stepped off the bridge, leaving Jim securely webbed to the railing. Jervis let them fall for a second before shooting his first web at the bottom of the bridge. Jonathan’s face lit up as they started to swing.

(As they flew, Jonathan’s eyes remained locked on the webbing. If he’d had a notebook and wasn’t using both arms to hold on, he was sure he would be taking notes. When Jervis wasn’t looking, he could almost feel Jonathan’s gaze flit to him. He wasn’t sure if that meant anything, or was just a direct consequence of Jervis being the one keeping them airborne. When they’d touched down, back at their building, Jonathan hugged him before going inside, and though they’d technically been hugging the entire time they were swinging across Gotham, it felt much more intimate standing on solid ground.)


End file.
